Abortion

[TomerS]

The issue boils down to: Does a woman have the right to choose how to live her or life or should she instead be forced to have an entity that is not a human being grow inside of her and fundamentally change the course of her life against her choice?

A very important fact here is that an embryo is not a human being. Instead, it is an entity that has the potential to become a human being. But it is not able to live outside of the woman. Terminating a pregnancy is not killing a human being. It is killing a rapidly growing group of cells inside of a woman.

The reason the issue was so important to Ayn Rand, is that the opponents of abortion hold that women, rather than being free human beings with the right to make their own choices, are instead breeding animals who may not choose for themselves.

When you analyze it you see that you cannot have it both ways: Either a woman is a human being who is allowed to choose whether or not to have a child - and either assume or reject the full, long term responsibility of raising the child into adulthood, with all the rewards and costs associated with it - or she does not have that choice. If you take that choice away from her by force, you deny her the ability to live as a human being - a being of conceptual intelligence with free will able to act on her conclusions. Forcing a woman to have a child isn't causing a minor inconvenience, but has a major, long term, life altering consequence.

Forcing a woman to be a mother is no different than forcing a man into a profession against his choice - since motherhood is at minimum a 16 year commitment. Even if a man were well suited to a career he were forced into that does not make it right. It is his life and therefore his choice and it is force negates that choice. The same applies to abortion - the choice to avoid entering the profession of motherhood. In this regard, abortion has many similarities to the military draft - a forced profession, imposed against the will the of the individual that leads to the sacrifice of their freedom and happiness.

So in summary, on the issue of abortion: human beings have rights, embryos are not human beings, it is a terrible logical error, with terrible consequences to put the (non-existent) "rights" of embryos above the rights of human beings.

Edited January 24, 2009 by TomerS

[The Lonely Rationalist]

The issue boils down to: Does a woman have the right to choose how to live her or life or should she instead be forced to have an entity that is not a human being grow inside of her and fundamentally change the course of her life against her choice?

A very important fact here is that an embryo is not a human being. Instead, it is an entity that has the potential to become a human being. But it is not able to live outside of the woman. Terminating a pregnancy is not killing a human being. It is killing a rapidly growing group of cells inside of a woman.

The reason the issue was so important to Ayn Rand, is that the opponents of abortion hold that women, rather than being free human beings with the right to make their own choices, are instead breeding animals who may not choose for themselves.

When you analyze it you see that you cannot have it both ways: Either a woman is a human being who is allowed to choose whether or not to have a child - and either assume or reject the full, long term responsibility of raising the child into adulthood, with all the rewards and costs associated with it - or she does not have that choice. If you take that choice away from her by force, you deny her the ability to live as a human being - a being of conceptual intelligence with free will able to act on her conclusions. Forcing a woman to have a child isn't causing a minor inconvenience, but has a major, long term, life altering consequence.

Forcing a woman to be a mother is no different than forcing a man into a profession against his choice - since motherhood is at minimum a 16 year commitment. Even if a man were well suited to a career he were forced into that does not make it right. It is his life and therefore his choice and it is force negates that choice. The same applies to abortion - the choice to avoid entering the profession of motherhood. In this regard, abortion has many similarities to the military draft - a forced profession, imposed against the will the of the individual that leads to the sacrifice of their freedom and happiness.

So in summary, on the issue of abortion: human beings have rights, embryos are not human beings, it is a terrible logical error, with terrible consequences to put the (non-existent) "rights" of embryos above the rights of human beings.

When exactly does something become a human being? Upon birth?

What about cases of partial birth abortion, when the embryo is developed fully as a human being, and could exist independently outside the womb, but has not yet been born?

[softwareNerd]

What about cases of partial birth abortion, when the embryo is developed fully as a human being, and could exist independently outside the womb, but has not yet been born?

Partial birth abortions do not refer to situations where the fetus is "viable". The religious right love that description, because they want people to think a "viable" fetus is being aborted. In the vast majority of cases, this is not so.

[The Lonely Rationalist]

Partial birth abortions do not refer to situations where the fetus is "viable". The religious right love that description, because they want people to think a "viable" fetus is being aborted. In the vast majority of cases, this is not so.

But what if the fetus is viable and can survive independently? Could one still have the moral right to abort it?

[SD26]

Partial birth abortions do not refer to situations where the fetus is "viable". The religious right love that description, because they want people to think a "viable" fetus is being aborted. In the vast majority of cases, this is not so.

Careful, the idea of "viable" can have different meanings. There are living family members out there that were once labeled as "non viable". No, these aren't individuals that go out an cure cancer, but they are valuable to some families. Additionally, your statement starts on the exclusivity that partial birth abortions involve non viable "masses", but then you change it to vast majority.

Personally, I struggle with the abortion issue from a personal responsibility issue. Yes, if it is in the case of rape, incest, or a physical danger to the mother, which is even an exception in some religions, I accept abortion as reasonable and moral. After that, I'm not personally convinced yet for my reason above.

[softwareNerd]

Careful, the idea of "viable" can have different meanings. There are living family members out there that were once labeled as "non viable".

That's why I put it in quotes. My point is this: many people (before this there were two others in this very thread) do not know what "partial birth abortion" refers to. They think it means that the fetus is very near its full term... somewhere in the 30-something week range.

I was not trying to defend abortion in the post above [i've done a little of that earlier in this 880-post thread ]. It is just that the "partial birth" misunderstanding is something I see coming up, and I wanted to correct the minor factual point as to what it really means. On the viability question, I don't use viability as a criteria at all.

[Marc K.]

Personally, I struggle with the abortion issue from a personal responsibility issue. Yes, if it is in the case of rape, incest, or a physical danger to the mother, which is even an exception in some religions, I accept abortion as reasonable and moral. After that, I'm not personally convinced yet for my reason above.

These are the only instances when you would allow abortion? In other words you would force a woman, who has no desire to be pregnant or to have children, to carry an eight week embryo to term?

When exactly does something become a human being? Upon birth?

Yes. It must be human and it must be a being, an individual.

[Tabitha]

Personally, I struggle with the abortion issue from a personal responsibility issue. Yes, if it is in the case of rape, incest, or a physical danger to the mother, which is even an exception in some religions, I accept abortion as reasonable and moral. After that, I'm not personally convinced yet for my reason above.

The "it's OK in cases of rape or incest" argument is inconsistent. Either it is a life, or it's not. You can't have it both ways. Saying that embryos that were conceived via rape/incest are "less of a life" than those that were conceived for other reasons is shooting this part of the pro-life argument in the foot.

[Jake_Ellison]

But what if the fetus is viable and can survive independently? Could one still have the moral right to abort it?

No, I don't think it would be moral to wait with an abortion until the last week for instance, for no particular reason. Luckily, no one does.

However, that has nothing to do with the principle of individual rights:

Might I also add, I have always thought that rights applied to all living human beings, regardless of their status. Is this view contradicted by the Objectivist view of rights?

Rights apply to all men, and only to men, and they are defined in such a way that they don't conflict.

Something that doesn't exist independently of another man (is inside one for instance) cannot therefor have rights.

I happen to be the last person to raise this issue, and I've been answered in more detail here and here.

[SD26]

I recognize that Objectivism is a closed system, and the abortion issue has been stated by Rand. Someone will have to correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not attempting to establish a change, but I am trying to understand the part of the system that has the stance that it does about abortion. For me, it's not a hot button issue to me that makes me dislike Rand or Objectivism, but it helps me understand it, although I might not be able to accept this portion of it.

I appreciate the thoughts in advance.

Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.

Biologically, yes, any person that recognizes their freedom and is capable of rational thought recognizes that the act of sex is a method of procreation. That's how it works. Can we call the act of sex an application of force? Even the freedom of that reception of force? If that force isn't received with consent, it is rape. I can recognize that the freedom of the woman has certainly been violated as the act of force was not wanted. The product of that could certainly be aborted if the woman decided that, in my opinion, and obviously under Objectivist philosophy that allows a woman control of her body.

I struggle with the answer of abortion "across the board" because "the woman has rights to her body" and the like does not take responsibility for the free act at the beginning. Don't want to have children? Well, there are many obvious ways to get around that. Don't is always a good start, and obviously there are other methods also.

I'll just jump forward now. A mass of cells is brought to term. It is now a baby. I admit that I don't know Rand's specific stance on responsibility of children. Obviously, the child for years is completely dependent. No instincts, no ability to think, work, etc. Does the mother and/or father have responsibility to that production in its outside the womb form?

Maybe if those question can be answered, I'll understand the Objectivist ideology supporting the right of a woman that has taken the responsibility to engage in an force that can have a specific output of production. I don't know if they can be answered in a context that fulfills what I see as initial freedom of decisions started at the beginning of the process.

Sorry if I'm choppy too, I've got a few things going on today.

[TomerS]

For me, it's not a hot button issue to me that makes me dislike Rand or Objectivism, but it helps me understand it, although I might not be able to accept this portion of it.

You are overcomplicating things, and that is why you are struggling to understand the objectivist position.

A woman discovers she is pregnant. Inside of her is an entity that consists of several thousand cells. It is not a human being. The medical technology exists to allow her to remove the embryo. Does she have the right to choose her life as she wants to live it or does the embryo have rights which subjugate hers? To believe that women should not be allowed to choose to abort is to take sides against the rights of living human beings and in favour of entities that are not yet living human beings.

The most common mistake of the well intentioned questioner of abortion is that he confuses the embryo for a living human being, which it is not - it is a potential human being. The second most common mistake is to believe that a human being has the right to demand that another human being take care of them. You must make both mistakes to support a ban on abortion. First you must believe that an embryo is a human being. Second you must say that because the embryo needs the woman, she must make the sacrifice of giving her happiness and selfishness up to live selflessly and altruistically for the embryo.

To draw some concrete parallels: A rock is a potential sculpture if worked on by a sculptor. An embryo is a potential human being if a woman chooses to let it live inside of her for 9 months. But just as a sculptor must not be forced to devote 9 months to sculpting a rock, so it is wrong to force a woman to nurture inside her body an embryo for 9 months that she does not want. If you don't like the rock-sculptor example because the rock is not alive and the embryo is, let me give you two others. First, imagine you see an injured bird and know that you can take it in to your house and care for it to keep it alive or it will die. Should there be a law forcing you to take it in and care for it for years? Of course not. In this case, the bird, like the embryo is alive, and needs you to keep it alive. But you do not have an obligation to sacrifice your time and happiness for the bird. Another example would replace the bird with a man, and this example is therefore not the same as an embryo because a man has rights. However, a man does not have the right to demand that you sacrifice your life for his. If you choose to care for him, that is within your rights, but it is not within his rights to demand that you take care of him. That is exactly what the anti-abortion groups would have women do though - with beings that are not yet men. So think about it in a context that could be applied to you: there is a homeless man who needs you to take care of him by having him move into your house, and you will care for him for 16 years. Is it okay to force you to do this? Objectivism would certainly say no! That is what the abortion issue is all about - forcing women to breed to create people who they will then have to take care of for 16 years.

Edited January 24, 2009 by TomerS

[SD26]

Jake, thanks for the links to the posts by Jennifer and Mark. I think those kind of helped me a understand the ideology better.

Tomer, I'm struggling with the parallel's you drew, but I'll move on for a bit. Thanks for the input though.

[The Lonely Rationalist]

Wow, I'm happy everyone here is so helpful on these forums! Thanks again.

A woman discovers she is pregnant. Inside of her is an entity that consists of several thousand cells. It is not a human being.

Now, sorry for seemingly repeating myself, but I've ssen way too many definitions of what a human being is. I've heard (And yes, I was a member of the religious right for most of my life, so that's why I'm having so much trouble with this issue) that life begins when sperm meets egg, creating the DNA of a human.

I've heard that it is not a human until it is born. To which I ask, if it can survive out of the womb independently, why is it not considered a human, if still in the womb?

I've heard some say that it is not a human until a rational faculty begins to develop. This makes the most sense to me.

So, I guess I'm asking, am I correct in assuming that it is not a human when it is conceived, but becomes a human when it's ability to reason begins to develop?

Edit: Now that I think about it, if having a rational faculty is all that makes something human, is not an ape human?

Edited January 24, 2009 by The Lonely Rationalist

[TomerS]

So, I guess I'm asking, am I correct in assuming that it is not a human when it is conceived, but becomes a human when it's ability to reason begins to develop?

Edit: Now that I think about it, if having a rational faculty is all that makes something human, is not an ape human?

The baby is clearly human when it is born. It is clearly not human in the first trimester. That trimester is what the abortion debate is all about. There is more to consider in the third trimester. In his lectures on his book, Objectivism, The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff goes into quite some detail about the issue of late term abortions which I won't repeat in this forum (I'll just point out that he argues that in extenuating circumstances they are reasonable).

The second thing I have to say is that an ape does not have a rational, conceptual faculty. No ape in history has been up to a task like "go and get 6 red triangular shapes from that pile". They do not posses anything more than the most rudimentary conceptual faculty. That kind of task is what we train children to do at the age of 3 or 4. It's simply not in their nature. They cannot form and hold abstract concepts like numbers, shapes let alone abstractions from abstractions. This has nothing to do with the abortion debate directly, but you do need an ability to differentiate between an ape and a human on the essentials - and it is the conceptual faculty as opposed to the absence of body hair that is the essential difference between man and ape.

[bluey]

Regardless of whether it's a human or not (and I think that viability is a pretty acceptable line, whether that happens at birth or at, say, 30 weeks or a certain point of neural development or something), the question is really "woman vs. fetus". It's not that the fetus is a totally rightless object. No one else has the right to decide that the fetus should be aborted - only the mother has that right. Why? Because she has the right to decide what happens to her own body. It's not so much a matter of what you can do with a fetus as it is a matter of what you can force a woman to do against her own rational decision.

I normally don't like to discuss abortion at all because considering the availability, reliability and relative affordability of all kinds of different methods of birth control, there's no reason to end up pregnant in the first place if you don't want to. I mean, it should really be a non-issue by now just for that reason. If you're taking reasonable precautions and you end up accidentally pregnant (in the very few cases where birth control fails), any responsible person is going to realize what's happened early enough to have a very early term abortion. Early enough that it really would be a cluster of cells, viability wouldn't be a concern or an issue and before she starts to "show" or anything that anyone else could notice - she can make a decision for herself without interference from parents, community, even partner if she wants to leave them out of it. Or rather, that would be the situation if medicine weren't already a socialized industry. So really what's being discussed in these debates is what you can force poor women to do, which opens a whole new can of beans.

That's my 2c on the abortion issue: it shouldn't be an issue in the first place and it's also not about the rights of the fetus (no one has a right to be sacrificed for, even if they are adorable or really really need it: if you have a baby then you have a chosen responsibility to care for it, it still doesn't have the intrinsic right to be cared for. If you choose not to have a baby then guess what, you don't have a baby and therefore no responsibility for the baby).

[bluey]

Don't want to have children? Well, there are many obvious ways to get around that. Don't is always a good start, and obviously there are other methods also.

Ick. This was a good argument say, more than 70 years ago when sex & babies did go hand in hand. Back then yeah, if you have sex then babies are a likely and unavoidable consequence of that. But hey, that's not so anymore. The invention of birth control is a material change in the nature of sex (for women, at least). It's reliable enough to have divorced the act from this particular consequence. Like it or not, having sex is NOT asking for babies any more. It's very reasonable to expect that you won't get pregnant from having sex if you're smart about it. If you do all the right things and still end up preggers? I don't see how that commits you to 16 years of service to another being, or even 9 months. It's reversible, and it's even relatively safe now (about as safe as full-term childbirth), so why should a woman pretend it's not an option?

[DavidOdden]

So, I guess I'm asking, am I correct in assuming that it is not a human when it is conceived, but becomes a human when it's ability to reason begins to develop?

The relevant question is, what has rights. A human being has rights, and nothing else does. The concept "being" implies "exists independently", thus your liver is not "a being". A fetus also does not exist independently.

[The Lonely Rationalist]

if you have a baby then you have a chosen responsibility to care for it, it still doesn't have the intrinsic right to be cared for. If you choose not to have a baby then guess what, you don't have a baby and therefore no responsibility for the baby).

Are you saying that once a baby is born, it's parents have no obligation to care for and may abandon it if they decide they don't want it?

[The Lonely Rationalist]

The relevant question is, what has rights. A human being has rights, and nothing else does. The concept "being" implies "exists independently", thus your liver is not "a being". A fetus also does not exist independently.

Full Disclosure: Like I said before, I have been a member of the religious right until about 4 months ago, so that's why I am still having trouble with this issue.

Who determines what a human "Being" is? A severely handicapped person can not exist independently, nor can an infant. They both are totally dependent on others. Why do they have rights, but an embryo does not.

Thanks again for putting up with me. I'm just trying to rationally figure out abortion, without mystical arguments about souls.

[bluey]

Are you saying that once a baby is born, it's parents have no obligation to care for and may abandon it if they decide they don't want it?

No, I'm saying the opposite of that. If you have a baby, i.e. bring a baby into the world instead of not bringing a baby into the world (since there are all kinds of ways to prevent that happening, including but far from limited to abortion), then you DO have a responsibility to take care of it. If you abandon your child (adoption isn't abandoning) then you are a bad person and I wouldn't have anything to do with you and you should be prosecuted or something for breaking a very important contract, basically (a special kind of contract, which you enter into both on your behalf and on behalf of your child). If you are prevented by force from exercising your choice not to have a child, then I would say it's the problem of whoever initiated that force against you. That's where the problem lies - a contract entered into by force isn't binding. If you want people to be responsible for their children, they have to be able to choose to have them or not.

Who determines what a human "Being" is? A severely handicapped person can not exist independently, nor can an infant. They both are totally dependent on others. Why do they have rights, but an embryo does not.

Doesn't matter. The mother is indisputably a human being and has rights that trump any rights held by another being who demands a sacrifice of her. A severely handicapped person doesn't have the right to force someone to take care of them indefinitely, either. Of course if you agree to take care of them and then just abandon them to the elements, that's wrong, but it's wrong because you had a choice in the first place.

Again it's important that only the mother has the right to make a decision about the embryo. How would you defend the initiation of force (by the government or a doctor) against the mother in order to force her body to do something she doesn't want it to do, since the option is legally and safely available to her to make a different choice?

[DavidOdden]

Who determines what a human "Being" is? A severely handicapped person can not exist independently, nor can an infant.

You're asking the wrong question: you should be asking "what is a being". Human tissue is human, a being is a being. Handicapped people and infants do exist independently, even if their survival is not metaphysically given (nor is the survival of any other being). An infant is actually separate from whoever takes care of it. A fetus is not separate from the woman bearing it.

[bluey]

You're asking the wrong question: you should be asking "what is a being". Human tissue is human, a being is a being. Handicapped people and infants do exist independently, even if their survival is not metaphysically given (nor is the survival of any other being). An infant is actually separate from whoever takes care of it. A fetus is not separate from the woman bearing it.

It's all the wrong question if you insist on only looking at the issue from the standpoint of what you can or can't do to a fetus. It wouldn't matter if a fetus could get a degree and make pancakes intrauterine, the issue is using force against a mother to prevent her from making her own rational decision about her own life and making use of the resources available to her.

Pro-lifers insist on ignoring the mother, thereby dropping the entire context of the situation, which reduces the debate to pure medical speculation. It's like asking when a child is an adult. Aren't some kids reasonable enough to vote before 18? The fact is that the "line" (birth) is more or less arbitrary and that kills your argument if all you have is "a fetus isn't human". Of course without any context at all it's better to err on the side of not murdering babies. However that's completely beside the point.

[DavidOdden]

It's all the wrong question if you insist on only looking at the issue from the standpoint of what you can or can't do to a fetus.

It is okay to ask the question of whether a fetus has rights, because as we know, it is forbidden in a moral society to kill a being with rights. Thus it does matter. You have to look at the question of whether the mother has rights (that is never in question) and whether the fetus does (in fact it doesn't but arriving at that conclusion is what screw up many people's reasoning). If, counter to fact, a fetus or, say, a spleen, had rights, then you would have to ask whose rights are superior. The legal-moral principle is that force must be used to prevent one being from violating the rights of another, so you have to determine what actions constitute a violation of rights. If you conclude that a fetus has rights, then you must conclude that man's rights do conflict, because it's also beyond question that a woman has a right to her own body.

Surely you recognize that a mother may not rightly kill her newborn infant; but why is that? It's because the infant has rights, which follows from the fact that human beings have rights, and an infant is a human being. What distinguishes an infant from a fetus is that a fetus is not a human being. In other words, this really is the fundamental issue: it is not arbitrary.

[TomerS]

Full Disclosure: Like I said before, I have been a member of the religious right until about 4 months ago, so that's why I am still having trouble with this issue.

I applaud you for having found objectivism after being affiliated with the religious right. I applaud your search for answers also. You may be trying to master the answer to a very complicated answer too early in your journey though.

Philosophy is hierarchical and you are asking questions about rights, which are pretty much at the very end of the hierarchy. You need to start with metaphysics and epistemology, then move on to ethics, and from there you can move on to rights.

I know this doesn't directly answer your questions about abortion, but you really need to have a solid foundation to understand rights and where they come from. Given that you are clear that you're looking for a non-mystical solution, objectivism can offer you the answer. However, it can't give it to you in 100 words or less. You have to go back and do the learning from the beginning.

[bluey]

It is okay to ask the question of whether a fetus has rights, because as we know, it is forbidden in a moral society to kill a being with rights. Thus it does matter. You have to look at the question of whether the mother has rights (that is never in question) and whether the fetus does (in fact it doesn't but arriving at that conclusion is what screw up many people's reasoning). If, counter to fact, a fetus or, say, a spleen, had rights, then you would have to ask whose rights are superior. The legal-moral principle is that force must be used to prevent one being from violating the rights of another, so you have to determine what actions constitute a violation of rights. If you conclude that a fetus has rights, then you must conclude that man's rights do conflict, because it's also beyond question that a woman has a right to her own body.

Surely you recognize that a mother may not rightly kill her newborn infant; but why is that? It's because the infant has rights, which follows from the fact that human beings have rights, and an infant is a human being. What distinguishes an infant from a fetus is that a fetus is not a human being. In other words, this really is the fundamental issue: it is not arbitrary.

Abortion isn't simply killing a fetus though, it's ending a pregnancy. Early term abortions are done by simply making the uterus inhospitable to the fetus, not by directly killing it (late term abortions are another story but like I said before, there's no reason why these are even still an issue). In the process the fetus usually dies (if not, it is usually put up for adoption). That's why it's not OK to kill an infant - because it would just be murder, nothing else is being accomplished, you can put the baby up for adoption if you don't want it, but by allowing it to be born in the first place you are accepting responsibility for it. Legally the only alternative is to force the woman to sacrifice for another being, which is always a violation of her rights. The mother isn't violating the baby's rights by refusing to provide for it (although after birth, she would be violating its rights if she killed it because she has initiated a contract). The death of the fetus is the byproduct, not the goal.

If you could remove a 12-week fetus from a womb without killing it, then you would have an issue. Namely, does the fetus now have a right to be taken care of and if so, who's going to do it? If this were an issue then all the more reason to continue improvements in other forms of birth control.